jueves, 31 de mayo de 2012

Since Sobre héroes y tumbas [On Heroes and Tombs], once considered to be an undisputed classic of the Boom decade and now seemingly struggling just to maintain its mere "disputed classic" status among Lat Am lit fans not named Ignacio Echevarría, was something like 3/4 "pretty good" + 1/4 "laughably bad" according to the uncanny but always accurate arbiter of excellence calculations I worked out on scraps of paper over the course of two calendar years, this post is going to have to be somewhat more complicated than I'd originally intended. Damn you, Sabato! A 508-page chunkster that intermittently intercalates a dry 1840s historical narrative having to do with Argentina's civil wars into a gothic 1950s Buenos Aires crime story in which the daughter of one of the leading families of the city decides to burn her father and herself to death in a premeditated act at least partially related to the family's genetic predisposition to mental illness, the novel is an ambitious but sprawling mess which--at its best--actually delivers an emotionally and psychologically convincing story of star-crossed teenaged lovers Martín and Alejandra set against a lugubrious and politically turbulent Baires backdrop. At its worst, as in the 150-page first-person "Informe sobre ciegos" ["Report on the Blind"] said to have been prepared by Alejandra's father and completed on the night of his mysterious death, the novel offers up a cheesy and over the top example of Sabato trying too hard to impersonate the voice of a cruel, paranoid, incest-driven madman and failing badly. Which is too bad because, the dimestore surrealism and Dostoevsky-wannabe bits aside, Sabato's use of Buenos Aires as a setting feels authentic and is occasionally utterly compelling--here, in this bit involving a Borges cameo, for example, and later on, when Roberto Arlt gets namedropped in the middle of a wild screed focused on immigrants and anarchists before the coup against Yrigoyen in 1930. In other words, an OK read but hardly the big deal it's sometimes made out to be except in snatches. (Booket)

Borges (l) and Sabato at the Bar Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo, Bs.As.

A dissenting opinion

Ignacio Echevarría has this to say about Sobre héroes y tumbas in his entry on the work on page 49 of Los libros esenciales de la literatura en español: narrativa de 1950 a nuestros días: "El tiempo ha ido menguando los apasionados fervores que en su momento suscitó esta novela, que sin embargo mantiene --para los lectores más jóvenes y para los que vuelven a serlo cuando recuerdan la lectura que hicieron de ella-- el encanto de su propio exceso, de su ambición descontrolada, de sus énfasis dostoievskianos, de su solemnidad, de su arrebato, de su desgarro; de todo aquello, en definitiva, que despierta en la actualidad una condescendiente reprobación" ["Time has been diminishing the intense fervor that this novel provoked in its heyday, which nonetheless still maintains--for younger readers and for those who become young again when they remember their reading of it--the delight of its own excess, of its unrestrained ambition, of its Dostoyevskian emphases, of its solemnity, of its fury, of its impudence: of all that which, in short, nowadays arouses a condescending condemnation"].﻿

jueves, 24 de mayo de 2012

A while back, Stu from Winstonsdad's Blog--one of my ideological comrades-in-arms on account of his particular enthusiasm for literature produced outside the U.S. and the U.K. and the fact that he's not, to my knowledge, a card-carrying member of either the paranormal romance or the Austen/Brontë sisters/Dickens mafias so prevalent elsewhere in the vampiric back alleys and Victorian mean streets of the English language blogosphere--asked me if I'd be interested in helping him put on a Spanish language literature month modeled on Iris' Dutch Lit Month and the German Lit Month hosted by Caroline and Lizzy last year. How could I say no to such a great idea and dedicated champion of international fiction? To this end, Stu and I will be offering a Spanish Language Lit Month (or Spanish Lit Month for short) in July to help celebrate any/all Spanish language works of your choice ever written. How do you participate? Easy! Read and write-up one or more poems, short stories, nonfiction works, novellas or novels originally written in Spanish, and then tell me and/or Stu about it so we can mention it on our blogs--naturally, you may read the works in Spanish or in translation as suits your language skills and interests. For those looking for a little more interactive experience in July, we also have the following program of events planned during the month:

Friday, July 6th, thru Sunday, July 8th

(on participating blogs)

A "watchalong" of Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura's 1976 Cría cuervos, a drama that looks at the end of the Franco era from troubled eight year old Ana's perspective and then from the adult Ana's perspective some 20 years later. A classic of Spanish cinema and one of my personal all-time movie faves in any language.

Friday, July 13th, thru Sunday, July 15th

(on participating blogs)

A group read of Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti's 1950 A Brief Life [La vida breve], widely considered to be one of the canonical novels in 20th century Latin American fiction.

Friday, July 20th, thru Sunday, July 22nd

(on participating blogs)

A group read of Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas' 2001 Bartleby & Co. [Bartleby y compañia], a witty anti-novel composed by one of contemporary Spain's most cutting-edge writers.

Stu and I have a wrap-up week planned for the last weekend of the month to assemble link round-ups of whatever posts people contribute to the event, so we hope that you'll consider reading along with us on your own and/or for the Saura, Onetti, and Vila-Matas fiestas. Until then, please let us know if you have any questions--and hope to see many of you back here during Spanish Lit Month in July. ¡Hasta pronto!

sábado, 12 de mayo de 2012

Berlin Alexanderplatz (The Criterion Collection DVD, 2007)
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany, 1980
In German with English subtitles

Although I couldn't tell you if Rainer Werner Fassbinder really put the "germ" in New German Cinema, I wouldn't bet against it either. An immensely entertaining and occasionally pretty fucked-up fifteen and a half hour made-for-TV adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 modernist classic--here remastered and presented "in 13 parts & an epilogue" in a superior sepia print than was supposedly originally seen in Cold War living rooms back in the day--the willfully confrontational Berlin Alexanderplatz doggedly follows in the footsteps of oafish, not quite right in the head protagonist Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht in a bravura performance) as he attempts to go straight after being released from prison for the "accidental" beating death of his prostitute girlfriend Ida four years earlier. That some things just aren't meant to work out for the character will become clear early on with chapter titles like "The Punishment Begins" and "A Hammer Blow to the Head Can Injure the Soul," but romantic types just might be tempted to hold out hope for the guy whenever old love Eva (a spot-on Hanna Schygulla) and fetching new love Mieze (Barbara Sukowa, ditto) appear onscreen to try to protect their Franz from true evil in the form of "best friend" Reinhold Hoffman (a preternaturally sinister Gottfried John). However, as Fassbinder tells Döblin's story, Biberkopf's on again/off again struggles to avoid returning to a life of crime only serve as a launch pad for some even more unsettling reflections on crime and destiny on a metaphysical plane. Is the childlike but violent Biberkopf being tested by God or Satan? Are his Job-like troubles all caused by his poor life choices or is it just impossible for a man to "live in a human skin" in the Weimar Berlin of 1928-1929? Are God and Satan actually one and the same? Who or what is "The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent" in the Freienwalde forest? Whatever you make of Berlin Alexanderplatz's metaphysical concerns, one of the things that kept my eyes glued to the screen throughout Fassbinder's bleak but unexpectedly fascinating underworld epic was that many of his storytelling choices were as entirely unpredictable as his mercurial main character. An intrusive narrator (Fassbinder in a chillingly omniscient voiceover) frequently extends warnings to the characters, intones passages from the Old Testament, and recites grim catastrophe statistics from the newspapers at key moments, for example, alternating these pronouncements with soundless passages where text from Döblin's novel appears on silent movie intertitle cards. Visually, the film also offers deliberate provocations like the grainy slaughterhouse scene where man's fate is compared to that of cattle and another scene or two--mayhaps more amusing to this viewer--that pay homage to Weimar degeneracy with Biberkopf's visits to a Berlin brothel district where the Whore of Babylon is on sale to connoisseurs of human flesh looking for something different in the fetish department. Not for everybody and certainly not for book blogger squares but good, clean transgressive fun for anyone that can appreciate a rewrite of Ecclesiastes fora redemption story set in just pre-Nazi late 1920s Berlin: "And I turned and saw the injustice of everything that took place beneath the sun." (The Criterion Collection)

Fassbinder on the set

Berlin Alexanderplatz, my first Fassbinder ever if I'm not mistaken, is my German entry for the Foreign Film FestivalandCaroline'sWorld Cinema Series events. Mini-series over, the Döblin novel is now underway.

sábado, 5 de mayo de 2012

Rome Open City [Roma città aperta] (The Criterion Collection DVD, 2009)
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Italy, 1945
In Italian and German with English subtitles

As excited as I once was to watch Italian neorealism standard-bearers Rome Open City (1945), Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948) in quick succession, I should note that the first and most famous title in Criterion's nifty Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy box set is so dated and/or otherwise flawed as a narrative that it took me three separate attempts to push past the 45-minute mark in the film. As luck would have it, at least the third time was the charm. Shot on location in the then just recently-liberated Rome while the waning moments of WWII still raged on elsewhere in the devastated country, Rome Open City's fictionalized storyline regarding Italian resistance to the nine months of German occupation of the Eternal City ultimately won me over with its unequivocally visceral you-are-there look and passion. Its strengths are numerous: the documentary-like "realism" conveyed by the bombed-out cityscapes and scenes of the poor mobbing bakeries for bread; charismatic performances by Aldo Fabrizi and Marcello Pagliero as the neighborhood priest and fugitive Communist military leader whose paths cross and fates meet as a result of their resistance activities against the Nazis and the Italian fascists; a bold thematic confrontation with the barbarity of torture and the death of innocents that must have traumatized contemporary filmgoers still raw from the ravages of the war. Its weaknesses, unfortunately, are also fairly numerous: a melodramatic score that undermines the relative simplicity of other aspects of the filmmaking; the miscasting of Anna Magnani as a meek, clingy bride-to-be (anyone who's seen the actress in Mamma Roma will know that she has way too strong a personality for that meek act to be pulled off!); the weird bourgeois morality message hinted at by the fact that two of the film's most reprehensible characters, a mincing Gestapo chief and his drug-dealing lesbian informant, are based on lurid sexual orientation stereotypes. Despite its flaws, what helped make Rome Open City a winner for me for its entertainment value and not just for its history lesson was its unmistakable raw power. The Gestapo chief to Don Pietro, referring to the imminent torture of the priest's "subversive" and "atheist" associate: "You Italians, no matter your party, have a weakness for rhetoric. But I'm sure we'll come to an agreement before dawn." The priest: "He won't talk." Why? "I'll pray for him." Although there's no easy way to resolve such a scene given man's known capacity for evil, the look in Don Pietro's eyes--valiant face to face with the enemy but apparently contrite that prayer is all he has to offer to his acquaintance--suggests that Rossellini probably wasn't interested in looking for one. (The Criterion Collection)

An iconic scenefrom Rome OpenCity

Rome Open City was (re)viewed with my Foreign Film Festival and Caroline's World Cinema Series in mind. For a write-up on another Italian neorealist classic, please see Séamus' take on Vittorio De Sica's 1948 Bicycle Thieves [Ladri de biciclette] here.﻿